TRISTEN TAYLOR: Peace in an era of endless bloodshed

With death and destruction now seemingly ubiquitous from one side of the globe to the other, the prospects of achieving world peace appear remote. 

Long-running antagonisms, such as North Korea versus America and Pakistan versus India, have no end in sight ... apart from a nuclear one. The civil war in Myanmar has continued since 1948, as has the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Insurgency has blighted Colombia for the past 60 years and the mess in Ukraine goes all the way back to the partitions in 1772-95 of the Polish—Lithuanian Commonwealth. 

The Democratic Republic of Congo’s (DRC’s) terrible long run of conflict started — if we discount King Leopold of Belgium’s personal acquisition of the territory in 1884 — with the Congo Crisis right after independence. In 1961 the country was split between the Republic of the Congo, the Free Republic of the Congo, and the two secessionist provinces of South Kasai and Katanga. 

SA mercenaries were heavily involved in that conflict, as was the UN. What seems to have changed between then and now is that the fighting in the DRC has become downright fierce. 

Fifty countries around the world are now experiencing armed conflict, most seemingly intractable. Is there really no solution? The most important reason war is chosen instead of peace is that there is little discussion of what peace actually entails. We can’t implement what we don’t understand.   

The ending of a war involves two distinct moral acts. The first is to halt the killing, which is an inherently worthwhile act and should see no delay. After all, war is starvation, limbs torn asunder, infrastructure turned to rubble, bodies charred beyond recognition and women raped over and over. Children — those lucky enough to survive — are doomed to lifetimes of nightmarish trauma.

But by and of itself stopping the bloodshed doesn’t bring about peace. In a speech to the US Senate on January 22 1917, six weeks before America entered the Great War, US president Woodrow Wilson said the goal should be “a peace without victory”, for victory — the imposition of a victor’s terms — bred only resentment and set up the next war.   

“Only a peace between equals can last,” Wilson told the senators. “Only a peace the very principle of which is equality and a common participation in a common benefit ... no-one asks or expects anything more than an equality of rights. Mankind is looking now for freedom of life, not for equipoises of power.”

This is where the second moral act comes in: abolishing the conditions for future war. Thomas Mann, a winner of the Nobel prize for literature, fled Germany in 1938. Four years later he published an essay in The Atlantic about what should happen after Hitler’s defeat: “If democracy is to hold its own, it must be done through a socially established freedom that rescues individual values by friendly and willing concessions to equality; through an economic justice which ties all of democracy’s children closely to it.”

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, a sorry disgrace who has no business calling himself Labour, obviously hasn’t read Wilson or Mann. Earlier this month he increased the UK defence budget by decreasing the aid budget. Simultaneously buying bombs and impoverishing people is a particularly bad strategy to end war.   

“Peace cannot be had without concession and sacrifice,” Wilson had forewarned. “There can be no sense of safety and equality among the nations if great preponderating armaments are henceforth to continue here and there to be built up and maintained.”

Starmer and others of his warmongering bent are adding to already crushing annual global military expenditure — $2.4-trillion, and that’s just the 2023 figure. Last year’s will surpass that, and this year’s is headed even higher. If those trillions were spent on global social ills we would have a glorious state of humanity never seen before. Utopia is here for the taking, but because Starmer has Winston Churchill delusions, he’s decided the current dystopia is our lot. 

One of the reasons we do live in dystopia is that there is no plan. There’s just chaos. President Cyril Ramaphosa deliberately made us a combatant in the DRC, an utterly pointless and tragic deployment because there was no road map to peace — we just kind of went to do God knows what. As in Mozambique, the deployment was an exercise in delusion and impotence. 

The last serious plan to end war came with the founding of the UN in 1945: to paraphrase German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, the aim was to pacify the violence of war itself through multilateral legal means. The victors of World War 2 — the permanent members of the UN’s security council — would shepherd the rest of us to peace.

Having taken on this awesome responsibility the West and the communist bloc promptly unleashed the hell of proxy war. The Cold War was extremely hot, it was just that the blood wasn’t spilt on the traditional killing ground called Europe. The savagery was exported. 

The key thrust of Wilson’s speech — he wasn’t a man to speak lightly — was that peace is not just a condition of a specific situation but also of the general. For an individual peace to hold, say in Sudan, there needs to be peace overall. A stable world breeds peace. An unstable world produces conflict. SA is a good case in point. After much negotiation and compromise we were able to bring an end to violent political conflict and obtain freedom. But we didn’t achieve peace.

In January, two Colombian rebel groups, the National Liberation Army and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, had it out. About 80 people were killed in the fighting. Yet 72 people are murdered every day in SA and about 27,000 people a year are intentionally killed. The total number of deaths from Colombia’s 60 years of armed conflict is estimated at 225,000. The total number of murders in SA in 2012-24 was 250,070.

SA murders exist alongside endemic and deep inequality: democracy’s children are not bound together in economic justice. Our politicians have not created the general material welfare and broad stability required for peace. According to the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime there were 483 political assassinations in SA in 2000-23. With the benefit of hindsight, what we got in 1994 was a ceasefire.

This is what has been happening at a global level for decades, perhaps centuries — a series of ceasefires. There’s no peace because the ideas of people such as Wilson aren’t implemented. The constant quest for geopolitical advantage and “security” through arms creates the instability conflict thrives in. Ceasefires haven’t led to peace; rather, they’ve become interregnums in the unbending path of war. 

As for the debacle at the White House involving Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky ... that was not exactly diplomacy at its finest. Amid the fallout Mann’s 1942 essay comes to mind again. “One must not forget,” he wrote, “that in 1919 the victorious nations held unlimited power in their hands to bring about the changes that could have prevented the present disaster. Because of egotism and lethargy they have made bad use of their plenipotence.” 

• Taylor, a freelance journalist and photographer, is a research fellow in environmental ethics at Stellenbosch University.